A blood bath on China’s beach?

No! The culprit is the Sueda plant. Red Beach, appropriately named is located in Dawa county in Liaoning, China, this vast expanse of grassland thrives in the alkaline soil of one of the world’s largest wetland and reed marsh. The beach is really red, this is no blood bath. Phew! Thank goodness!

But it is not a perennial red, which is why tourists flock to the site at the twilight of the summer-autumn season to witness the flowering when it is at its peak chrome. Too early and you see green, too late and it is brown, and go on the wrong day and you see another ecology – the marshland under water. Quite like the Brazilian Pantanal, this ruddy resort will change its entire ecology in a flash, depending on the weather and season.

In just one day that we visited, the landscape went from mud at the first resort stop, to redish brown at the next, then to deep crimpson, along the 12km long field of what to the idle passerby may look like a field of hybrid poppy. And just as the flowering time will boost a habitat for the red-crowned crane, so will the sloopy brown mud provide a breeding gound for the millions of crabs that can be seen scurrying around at low tide.

And what makes the beach red? You ask. Well according to Wikipedia, it is the Sueda plant (Suaeda salsa (Chinese: 碱蓬草)[1] of the Chenopodiaceae family)that is responsible for this miles and miles of the carpeted sanguininty, pictured below.